Thursday, March 10, 2011

Synchronicity and a Call for Papers - All Your History Are Belong to Us: The Middle Ages, Medievalism, and Digital Gaming

I came up with the idea of incorporating Dragon Age 2 into a post on interactivity, incorporation, identity and storytelling. I mentioned this to James and discovered he'd been thinking on ARG's and transmedia projects - you can read some of his thoughts here and listen to an intriguing podcast here on the subject published by the folks who are also publishing the forthcoming Immanence of Myth book.

So this morning, I was cruising through my livejournal friends-list when I came across this:
All Your History Are Belong to Us: The Middle Ages, Medievalism, and Digital Gaming (more details below after I've finished pontificating)

I know, I know. LJ is so very stone-age, so very Web 1.0 but I love it anyway, even though as writer Warren Ellis says: '[I]t's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands.'

And actually, Warren's a bit of a favourite around here. His epic Transmetropolitan cyberpunk comic series has a main character who seems to have mainlined the Gonzo journalism of the late, great Hunter S Thompson which in turn has inspired the Gonzomentary of the CLARK webseries.

Warren's also no stranger to games either; he wrote the script for the 2001 game Hostile Waters:Antaeus Rising and more recently worked on the storyline for the well known survival horror game Dead Space - which the Call for Papers below actually refers to in terms of 'templarization of history'.

Interestingly enough, I didn't originally intend the remark about LJ to be anything more than a throwaway one - I missed the original reference to Dead Space in the Call, and yet it's there; an acausal connection.

[O]ur expectations of narrative structure are actually incredibly unnatural. Our cognitive experience is not linear. Someone says something to you. You are reminded of something a few years ago. You wonder about the future. All of these things can happen while you are also walking and other things are happening around you which themselves may have past, present, and future layers occurring simultaneously, again from the perspective of their perception.

Oddly enough, it's just hit me that the protagonist of Dead Space is named Issac Clarke. Which is a bit weird, isn't it? Meaning soaking through everything, in all directions like a blob of jam on a pristine white tablecloth:

'It's very good jam,' said the Queen.'Well, I don't want any TO-DAY, at any rate.''You couldn't have it if you DID want it,' the Queen said. 'The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday--but never jam to-day.''It MUST come sometimes to "jam to-day,"' Alice objected.'No, it can't,' said the Queen. 'It's jam every OTHER day: to-day isn't any OTHER day, you know.''I don't understand you,' said Alice. 'It's dreadfully confusing!''That's the effect of living backwards,' the Queen said kindly: 'it always makes one a little giddy at first--''Living backwards!' Alice repeated in great astonishment. 'I never heard of such a thing!''--but there's one great advantage in it, that one's memory works both ways.''I'm sure MINE only works one way,' Alice remarked. 'I can't remember things before they happen.''It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,' the Queen remarked

Be seeing you.
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All Your History Are Belong to Us: The Middle Ages, Medievalism, and Digital Gaming

The Middle Ages remains a vibrant presence in contemporary culture, and while cinematic medievalism has been intensively investigated in the last decade, digital gaming has received relatively little attention despite its widespread cultural impact. For example, the video game market now grosses more domestically than Hollywood, and World of Warcraft boasts more than 12 million monthly paying subscribers (25 million total units). Gaming theory too has seen its share of innovation, and digital technologies are now a regular feature of higher education and cultural studies. Medievalism, in its various guises, has also been the subject of intense scrutiny in anthologies by Anke Bernau and Bettina Bildhauer, Medieval Film (2009); Karl Fugelso, Memory and Medievalism (2007); and David Marshall, Mass Market Medieval Essays on the Middle Ages in Popular Culture (2007). Further, the turn toward speculative medievalisms, object-oriented philosophy, and Actor-Network Theory has initiated new methodologies, raised new questions, and offered new possibilities for understanding actor-actant networks and overcoming the subject-object distinction, all of which enrich our understanding of digital and historical realities and problematize traditional understandings of subjectivity, temporality, and textuality.

A few of the more popular medievally-inflected gaming titles (and series) include:

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Mission

Modern Mythology is the group blog of Mythos Media, a transmedia production group. An open nexus for creation, discussion and analysis, on the part of people who are actively engaged in modern myths. Much of what you'll find here are works-in-progress, like the starts and stops of an ongoing conversation.

Present and past contributors have been engaged in a wide range of work outside of this project: we are film-makers, published authors, professors, we are doing advanced linguistic analysis for behavioral software, we work for ad agencies, play in bands. There are no borders anymore.